These are the weeks when Washington is at its best and its worst. At its best because the cherry blossoms are out. At its worst because the cherry blossoms are out.
These are the weeks when a lovely part of the city transforms into a snarled parking lot, as flower-peepers creep along Independence Avenue, rubbernecking to take in the pink powder-puffs lining the tidal basin. Gawking jaywalkers amble between the crawling bumpers, and pedestrians pause to take blossom selfies from the pavement.
During these days, drive anywhere near the National Mall, and you can add an hour to your journey.
Which is why savvy Washingtonians avoid the standard cherry blossom destination. Instead, many take the drive to Kenwood, a neighborhood in Maryland just above the District line. Densely planted with cherry trees, Kenwood is an insider’s alternative to the tourist-clogged Mall.
But better by far for enjoying flowering trees is a quiet, hidden garden spot on the eastern edge of Georgetown, the Oak Hill Cemetery. There was a great fad in the 19th century, begun near Boston with Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, for replacing austere and foreboding graveyards with inviting, park-like resting places that could be enjoyed by the living in communion with the dead. Oak Hill opened in the 1840s, very much on trend.
On a sunny day a few days ago, I stopped to wander the cemetery. Lines of cherry trees were in full bloom, having just popped that day. The cream and mauve petals of saucer magnolias fluttered down in a lazy breeze, falling amid the memorials and monuments: columns topped with urns, columns topped with angels, columns topped with figures in solemn repose, columns topped with funereal drapery carved from stone. Very few of the columns are plumb. They tilt this way and that, leaning with stoic weariness. A caretaker explained to me that the ravages of age are essential to the beauty of the place: “We’re a 19th-century cemetery,” he says. “We’re not trying to make it into a golf course.”
One of the pleasures of the place is to imagine the lives of those buried there. I found a George W. Roosevelt on the hillside; his headstone featured a Medal of Honor. I looked up his citation later: “At Bull Run, Virginia, [Roosevelt] recaptured the colors, which had been seized by the enemy. At Gettysburg captured a Confederate color bearer and color, in which effort he was severely wounded.” How extraordinary. For all the mechanized advancements in warfare of which the Civil War was a grisly sort of proving ground, the fighting still had one foot in the ancient world, where losing one’s eagle or capturing the enemy’s standard was of more significance than the loss of men.
The cemetery is not only nondenominational, but it also doesn’t judge those who rest there for the side they chose in the contest between North and South. Not far from Roosevelt’s grave is a family plot marked by an obelisk on a plinth. Carved in high relief are small shields for each of the inhabitants. Among them is a shield for Lt. W.G. Peter of the Confederate States of America, who died June 9, 1863, and one also for Col. W.O. Williams, another Confederate, who perished the same day.
I assumed the two must have fallen on the same field, perhaps at the Battle of Brandy Station. Instead, with a little research, I found that theirs had been notorious deaths, written about and illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, no less. The two, known to their family as Uncle Gip and Cousin Orton, had ridden into a Union fort at Franklin, Tenn., and presented themselves, complete with persuasive papers, as inspectors general of the United States Army, there to take stock of the outpost’s defenses. Making drawings and taking notes, it seems they were somewhat more rigorous in their duties than any real inspector general and soon aroused suspicion. The two were seized as spies. The colonel arresting them said with grudging admiration, “Gentlemen, you have played this damned well.” After a drumhead court-martial, Gip and Orton were hanged from a wild cherry tree.
As lovely as Oak Hill is, I’m not sure Gip and Orton would appreciate being interred under flowering cherries.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning auther of How’s Your Drink?
